Facebook Partnering With Spotify, MOG & Rdio To Create Music Platform To Crush All Others

Well this, via Mashable, is interesting — the long-rumored Facebook music platform will soon be unveiled!

The music and media platform will be announced at Facebook’s f8 developer conference on Sept. 22. It will allow users to listen to music from within Facebook.com. Evidence of Facebook’s music platform first surfaced in the code of Facebook’s video chat service.

According to two sources familiar with the matter, Facebook will not directly host or stream any music or media. Instead, it will rely on partners to provide the content. This is in contrast to Apple, Google and Amazon’s strategy of hosting music content on their servers. Facebook’s plan is to become a platform for media content in the same way it is a platform for applications and games.

One of our sources specifically mentioned three music services as launch partners: Spotify, Rdio and MOG. It’s unclear whether Facebook has lined up other launch partners for its music platform or whether Facebook will open up its platform to other developers. One of our sources noted, however, that Facebook doesn’t like playing favorites, so our bet is that Facebook will open up its music platform to other third-party developers.

Partnering with Spotify, MOG and Rdio makes a lot of sense since the company’s long rumored hangup with getting into music has been an unwillingness to get sucked into paying licensing fees to record labels. Working with hosting partners and providing a platform as opposed to hosting music themselves, ala Google, seems pretty smart on the face of it. It also feels like something that could even reinvigorate Facebook users, who seem to almost universally have a love/hate relationship with the site.